Beyond Organic Local Farm Products

Brewing Beer Part 2: Transferring to a Carboy

In Brewing Beer Part 1 I wrote about ordering a brewing kit and getting the solution ready to ferment. The beer sat in the primary fermenting bucket for a little under a week. Once there was no more gas bubbling out of the airlock, we knew that no more fermenting was going on. That meant it was ready to transfer to a carboy for secondary fermentation. We opened up the fermenting bucket and were rewarded with this:

The fermenting bucket after about 6 days

It smelled like beer! Next we had to siphon the solution into the carboy for secondary fermentation. We bought the carboys from our local brewing store, Jay’s Brewing. Rather than buying glass carboys we bought plastic better bottles. We figured the plastic would be lighter, and there’s less glass that I can break.

5 gallon Better Bottle plastic carboy, image from jaysbrewing.com

First we sanitized the carboy and the siphoning equipment using the sanitizing solution we received in the brewing kit.

The sanitized carboy and tubing

Then we setup everything for siphoning, with the fermentation bucket higher than the carboy.

The beer siphoning into the carboy

We had to try twice to get the suction started for the siphon. We did that by filling the tubing with water, and starting the siphon into the smaller bucket you see in the forefront of the picture. Once beer was flowing through, we transferred the tubing over to the carboy and filled it up with beer The siphoning took a while, but it didn’t need much attention in the process.

As the carboy was almost full, there was still some beer left in the fermentation bucket. That was by design as we had initially filled the fermentation bucket up to over 5 gallons. That allowed us to transfer 5 gallons, but leave a couple inches in the fermentation bucket, along with a lot of the sediment that was created during the fermentation. We want to leave all that sedimentation behind.

Now that the carboy was full, we closed it up with a rubber stopper, and put the airlock in the hole in the stopper. The beer will sit in the carboy for a few weeks, and then it’ll be ready to bottle. We’ll let you know how that goes when we get there!